Rowan Austin, head of trade and working capital product at NatWest, said this is important step to help reduce much of the time, expense and uncertainty in conducting international trade. “We want to leverage distributed ledger technology for our clients and the best way to achieve this is through global collaboration with other financial institutions and leading technology providers.”

The founding mandate from bank members of Marco Polo is to better serve trade customers’ needs by converging the physical, information and financial supply chains with digital trade data to enable easier access to credit, minimize risk and increase transparency through a global digital platform.

The platform is powered by R3’s Corda blockchain technology and open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) purpose-built for the global trade ecosystem. It allows banks to easily integrate into trade orchestrations bringing in ERP, procure to pay, logistics, payment, insurance data, real-time into the transactions.